Andy Cohen Rebuts Bethenny Frankel in a 'Today Show' Puff Piece

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | November 29, 2023 |

By Emma Chance | Celebrity | November 29, 2023 |

The latest development in the Battle For Bravo just dropped: Andy Cohen, executive producer and face of the network, was interviewed by media mogul Evan Ross Katz for…the Today Show? Sorry, no, not the Today Show, just their website, today.com. Bravo and Today share the same parent company, NBCUniversal, which is mentioned in a parenthetical disclaimer halfway through the article, so I guess that’s why. This comes after October’s Vanity Fair exposé, which detailed the experiences of former Bravo housewives Leah McSweeney and Eboni K. Williams, as well as public enemy number one, Bethenny Frankel. While McSweeney’s and Williams’s stories deserved to be told, much of the article served as a Frankel puff piece, and Frankel used the stage to basically blame everything bad that’s ever happened on a Bravo show, on Cohen.

Besides a brief mention of Frankel’s article at BravoCon earlier this month, it didn’t seem to cause the shockwaves she’d probably hoped for. But there’s no other reason for this article to have been written now. Cohen has already released two books, had two children, hosted multiple BravoCons, his birthday is in June…there’s nothing happening this week or month in his life or in the Bravoverse that warrants a puff piece, and puff piece this is. There’s praise of Cohen for managing to keep it all together as well as moments of introspection when he admits he’s made mistakes, like the time he praised New Jersey housewife Delores Catania for losing weight and asked her if she’d used Ozempic, and then learned through negative feedback that he shouldn’t praise women for looking skinny. So, sure, call that growth, I guess. But it doesn’t take long for the conversation to turn to Frankel.

This was Cohen’s response to Frankel’s story:

“I think it was a factually incorrect rehash. I think much of it had been reported already, and it lacked context…And specifically, it was a rehash of things that have been reported on and—most importantly—addressed by Bravo. We’ve addressed each of the things that did happen, and we’ve moved forward.”

He added that BravoCon only further proved how unproblematic the network is:

“I think BravoCon was further validation of what is really going on between the reality of our relationship with our talent and the place that these shows hold with our audience,” he said. “I think that is representative of how these shows wind up empowering the women on them to take charge of their voice and who they are.”

And if who they are is an out-of-touch, morally reprehensible, old-money freak like Ramona Singer, then so be it.